The Fifth World (2 page)

“Did you notice anything at all out of the ordinary?
Something that might have been missing from the office?”

Tess Mitchell pondered these questions a few seconds before shaking her head no. There was no way, she thought, that the wooden box containing a butterfly with giant yellow wings that she had found at Jack's feet could be of any use to the investigation. She had put it in her bag almost instinctively; she had no idea why a prominent theoretical physicist like Bennewitz would have been an insect collector, even though she herself was a real aficionado.

“May I tell you something, miss?” Officer Lewis said, in a conspiratorial tone of voice. “Jack Bennewitz's death is one of the strangest I've ever seen. And since you were the person who phoned it in, I'll have to ask you to remain in the precinct a while longer. You're our only witness.”

“Is it absolutely necessary?”

“I'm afraid so, Miss Mitchell. You may not know this, but the majority of all crimes are solved using information gathered in the first few hours of the investigation.”

N
O ONE WOULD EVER RECOMMEND THE
area around the Museo de América in Madrid as a place for a midnight stroll. Francisco Ruiz glanced at the dark pathway that stretched out from the Moncloa tower and checked his watch. Realizing that it was already past 11:00
PM
he stepped up his pace, so that he could get across that part of the walkway as fast as possible. Neither the empty echo of the Christmas carols nor the distant Christmas lights that framed the entrance to the city could dispel the pervading sense of total solitude that surrounded him. Temperatures had dropped considerably and almost instinctively
he pulled up his coat collar and began walking even faster.

“Where are you going in such a rush, professor?”

Ruiz recognized the voice right away. Of the many places to be caught by surprise in Madrid, this was by far the most forbidding. The man speaking to him had the same Central American accent as that of the individual who had been making threatening phone calls to his house for the past two weeks.

“You . . . !” he said, in a distressed whisper. Despite his arrogant facade, Ruiz was a coward. “Are you going to tell me once and for all what it is that you want from me?”

“Don't play tough with me, man. Not with me.”

The shadow that had intercepted him took a few steps forward, and was now standing directly beneath the only streetlamp that shed any light at all on the area, and Ruiz was perplexed by the image that now stood before him. The man was far shorter than he had imagined, and his face was graced by the most perfect Mayan features: aquiline nose, sharp cheekbones, tanned skin, and a braid of hair so black that it blended right into the wretched night. A row of exceedingly white teeth glinted in the middle of his dark eagle's face. He went on:

“I saw that you didn't listen to me, professor. The article you were working on came out in the paper . . .”

“And why would you care about that?”

“Oh, I care a lot, professor. More than you imagine. In fact, you know what? The reason I'm here now is to make sure that you don't publish the second part of that article you mentioned. You made the same mistake before, about nine years ago. You know, I'm amazed. In all this time you haven't learned anything, have you?”

“What the hell are you talking
about?”

Francisco Ruiz clung tightly to the folder in his hands, which contained the documents he needed to finish the groundbreaking article he was writing on the SOHO Project. In the past few days he had met with several experts in pre-Hispanic history in an effort to lend his piece, which was purely scientific in nature, a more startling angle. That was why he had gone all the way to the Museo de América . . . But now that he thought about it, the harassment had begun at the same time that he'd started meeting with these historians. This little Mayan man with the fierce gaze, barely five feet tall, had really managed to make him nervous. By now he was within inches of Ruiz's face, so close that if Ruiz took two steps forward he would bang right into him. His hands, buried deep in the pockets of his polar fleece jacket, seemed only to confirm Ruiz's hunch that he was up to no good.

“You must be the worst journalism professor in the entire university,” said the Mayan man. His accent was getting stronger and stronger, his voice becoming increasingly vehement. “Or have you already forgotten about Y2K, Don Francisco?”

A lightbulb suddenly went off in his head. So that was what this was all about? A reader who had been disappointed by an article of his? Ruiz had been one of Europe's fiercest proponents of the hypothesis that after midnight on December 31, 1999, computer systems the world over would simultaneously collapse because their internal calendars would be unable to make the leap from 1999 to 2000. Since the very earliest computers used two-digit date formats (1997 was 97, 1998 was 98, and so on), some people became convinced that at the dawn of the year 2000 operating systems would identify “00” as the year 1900 instead of 2000, which would, in turn, cause everything
to go haywire. In his columns, Francisco Ruiz had envisioned a kind of cyber-apocalypse: airports and hospitals in total meltdown, bank accounts and transactions on the blink, pensions unpaid, power stations, nuclear plants, and gas and oil lines completely cut off by the dysfunctional computer system, to say nothing of world financial systems, satellites, nuclear weapons, and streetlights, which would all become deprogrammed at the very same instant. Caught in the throes of his millennium fever, he had actually advised his readers to stockpile extra cash and provisions before New Year's Eve . . . just in case.

But of course, January 1, 2000, had come and gone, and none of the predicted calamities ever came to pass. Francisco had moved on to other topics in his columns, and quite soon the world forgot about the crisis that never was.

“SOHO is different,” he found himself saying. “It's quite a bit more serious.”

“Yes, I know it's serious!” retorted the Mayan. “Everything that has to do with the sun is serious. That's why I'm here.”

SOHO, shorthand for the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, was one of the technological playthings that had recently given NASA and the European Space Agency some of its most promising moments. From the day it was launched in 1995, SOHO had sent the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland literally billions of data regarding the sun, its magnetic storms, sunspots, and coronal mass ejections. SOHO had even found the time to identify no less than 1,500 comets that were not visible from Earth. The sinister-looking Mayan, however, did not seem the least bit interested in these achievements.

Before Francisco Ruiz could change direction and escape, his inconvenient interlocutor suddenly pounced upon him like
a bulldog. The impact, which caught Ruiz totally by surprise, sent the two men rolling downhill. The Mayan's determination to immobilize him, along with his quickened breathing, now had Ruiz scared for his life. The next thing he felt was a hot sensation in his chest followed by a dreadful noise, like a drain gulping down the last mouthfuls of filth spilling out from a broken pipe. It took a few moments for Francisco to realize that the noise was, in fact, emanating from him. From his solar plexus. Then everything felt cold, as if someone had taken off his coat. A sharp pain followed. Cloudy vision. Darkness.

Then, everything went black.

T
HE PRECINCT COMMANDER AT THE STONE
Avenue station in Tucson, Arizona, served himself another cup of coffee from the vending machine in the corridor without taking his eyes off Tess Mitchell. The young woman with the blond braids and frightened eyes couldn't stop fidgeting in the uncomfortable metal chair.

“You sure you wouldn't like something to drink, young lady?”

She shook her head. Lincoln Lewis had just informed her that federal agents were going to take over the case of Jack Bennewitz's death. Apparently, on his computer, they had found some interesting links between her physics mentor and various university professors in Central America, the Middle East, and Europe. One of them, Juan Martorell, from the University of Mexico, had been murdered not twenty-four hours earlier in Mexico City, his body thrown from the seventeenth floor of the Hotel Reforma. In the best interests of his investigation, the
police chief withheld this last bit of information.

“You and Jack were close?” he asked.

Tess nodded. They had known each other for four years. Together they had visited the most important telescopes in the United States, and had even made a few trips out of the country as well, to Arecibo, in Puerto Rico, and Mexico City, just a month earlier. Together they had gone to the pyramids at Teotihuacán, “the oldest astronomical observatory in the Americas,” as Bennewitz had admiringly called it.

“Did they tell you how Jack died?”

At this point, Tess had been in the police station for five hours, answering the same questions over and over again to a parade of different agents. It was clear that they had no leads. Just her. And she also knew, as the policeman she had seen on TV seemed to suggest, that they were prepared to put her through hell for as long as they could.

The young woman shook her head in response.

“A gunshot fired at him point-blank?” she guessed aloud.

“I'm afraid not, Tess. They tore his heart out, in one fell swoop. They did it with some kind of very sharp object, a blade or a prod that they sank into him in a single motion, slicing directly through his arteries.”

The young woman's eyes widened with fright. Now she understood that dark stain on Professor Bennewitz's shirt.

“We know it wasn't you,” the police chief assured her. “You wouldn't have the strength for something like that. Plus, Jack Bennewitz died at least two hours before you got to him. In all likelihood the murder did not even occur in that office. We found no traces of blood whatsoever there, except for the stains on his clothing. They must have brought him there
after they did it, sat him down, and left him for someone else to find him.”

“Really?”

The police chief nodded.

“Tell me, where were you at two o'clock this afternoon?”

Tess didn't hesitate:

“I had just left the Kitt Peak observatory,” she said, swallowing air as if muffling a sob. “I was there all morning, gathering information from the main telescope. When I found what I was looking for I went to Jack's office to show him. From the observatory it takes about ninety minutes to get to Tucson, so I would have been on the road at around that time . . .”

“Right. Now, since you weren't on campus when the crime occurred, I wonder if you could tell me if you or any of your friends saw anything unusual on campus today, either this morning or later this afternoon. Anything at all that struck you as unusual?”

Tess said nothing. She bowed her head, as if trying to extract a memory, any recollection at all that might offer the police some kind of clue to aid their investigation. The matter of the butterfly seemed irrelevant and anyway, she was too embarrassed to admit that she had taken something from a crime scene, so she just put it out of her mind. In a matter of seconds she replayed her arrival at the university, the ham and cheese sandwich she'd eaten in the Building B cafeteria, her thoughts about the university lecture they would be attending that afternoon . . . “Of course!” she suddenly exclaimed. “The university lecture, that's it!” Suppressing an incipient smile, she searched the police officer's eyes.

“W-well,” she stuttered. “I don't know if this means anything, but Jack Bennewitz was going to give a very important lecture
this afternoon in the auditorium of the main building. His students were all very excited about it. He was going to announce a major discovery.”

“Go on, please.”

“Well, Professor Bennewitz was going to announce the results of his latest work: a theoretical model capable of predicting high-intensity solar storms and eruptions. X-class eruptions, and even higher-level ones. It was rumored that the scale might have to be raised to Z class. He was especially concerned about a storm that could reach Z class. He called it the Big One.”

Lincoln Lewis's eyes opened wide. He had heard the techies in his department mention precisely those words, Big One, just minutes earlier. Several folders on the victim's computer were filled with references to it.

T
HE BIG ONE.

On the sixth floor of the United States Embassy in Madrid, Eileen Garrett and Bill Dafoe of the intelligence unit were having a heated discussion about those three words. The Spanish national police had just been asking them about it, after a journalism professor at the Complutense University had been found dead in the neighborhood of Moncloa with a briefcase full of Internet printouts about the Big One, as well as original documents that bore the letterhead of the Goddard Space Flight Center. The professor's folder was now sitting open on a conference room table at the embassy. Apparently, what the local police had found so unusual was the way the body had been mutilated: the aggressors had removed the man's heart and, while he was still alive, thrown his body down onto the entrance to the La
Coruña road from the overpass between the Moncloa tower and the university rector's office.

“So, do you have any idea what the hell this Big One is, Bill?”

Eileen's eyes bore into the back of her colleague, who could scarcely tear his eyes away from the most recent science supplement of the Spanish newspaper
El País.

“Well . . . It turns out that just yesterday this Ruiz character published an article explaining it,” he said, smacking the paper with his index finger.

“Are you serious? Really?”

“Listen: ‘In 1989 a solar eruption sparked one of the most significant plasma expulsions documented by astrophysicists to date. They classified it as an X-class flare and discovered that it had sent a proton cloud into space that took several hours to reach Earth. When it finally did, a magnetic storm shifted the planet's field by eight degrees, short-circuited telephone and power lines in Canada, and caused aurorae borealis in nonpolar zones. Sixteen years later, in January 2005, another X-class flare showered Earth with a proton storm: high-frequency transmissions in the US and Canada collapsed, and this time the aurorae were visible in Arizona. Fortunately, none of these sudden flare-ups directly impacted the Earth; they only struck us laterally. The day we receive a frontal impact, the consequences of the Big One will be devastating.' ”